Hello again,
First of all, thanks to those who were kind enough to try my
little puzzle. I don't think its worth too much time, but I will
elaborate a bit on what I have in mind by elegant.
Some years ago, at the annual Mathematica convention in Urbana, someone
sponsored a contest with prizes for the "best" solution to a
programming problem. One of the puzzles had to do with transforming
a list of zeros and ones into a significantly shorter list containing
the same information but in more compact form. This process is now
automated by the command Encode (I believe). I was new to Mathematica at the
time and was very impressed by the ingenuity shown by the experts.
I was hoping that my problem which is in essence a transformation by
summation-by-parts might be amenable to a similar stroke of
programming brilliance.
As I mentioned in my first post, the problem is relatively easy
to do by straight-forward, some might say brute force, methods.
In any case, thanks again. Always a pleasure to see how many of
you guys are willing to spend time to read our questions and respond
with insightful ideas.
Jack